Throughout this niche site series post I am going to document my entire journey on how to create a niche site.
The information will be presented in short summaries so you can get a quick overview of what I am doing and the really important parts I will link to valuable resource to give you further reading on that topic.
What is a Niche Site?
A niche site is a website that focuses on a specific subset of a larger market. Niche Websites are often spoken about in the same conversation as Authority Website. Authority websites are just larger niche sites, they have greater trust flow and and are a go-to resource for a large market.
Authority websites often start as niche websites before they grow into an authority resource themselves.
An example of a niche website may in the Health and Fitness industry might be a website that looks at kettle bell training. This also has the potential to become an authority site on training with kettle bells as well if enough work goes into the website.
My Goals for the Project
My goal for this niche site project is to learn a system I can replicate across many niches and to produce a niche site that can make $500 a month in a 6 month time frame.
How I started
I entered an opportunity to become a student with a one-on-one coach on how to build a profitable niche site. Unfortunately I was not chosen as one of the 3 students that would get the opportunity to take part but I didn’t want to waste the opportunity and there was still the option to follow along with the coaching calls.
I reached out to other members of the community and other people who had applied to be part of the coaching program and started a mastermind group to work through this project together. Already it has been an extremely valuable resource.
Will in my mastermind group has some great early resources for beginners starting out on their niche sites and has already provided me fantastic personal advice for my own niche site based on his own experience.
Now as I am writing the blog I am starting to thing whether or not I should even post this blog because I made so many mistakes that it was just a mess. But I think it is important to show that not everything is as straight forward as many websites make it out to be.
I am going to run you through my first week, the what I learned, what I need to change and how I am going to move forward from this week.
Phase 1
Pick a market
It sounds pretty straight forward. However I more or less skipped this step and just chose a market with very little research that I wanted to write about. I should have made a list of approximately 20 areas of interest and completed my due research on each of those areas of interest to see whether or not it was viable from a statistical point of view.
The next part was picking a sub-niche within a broad market. Again no research was done on other potential areas I was only working on the niche that I had chosen very early on.
What I learned from this first phase in hindsight.
- Do NOT skip over this research part.
Do it thoroughly because it will be the base of everything else you do going forward. I realised I was heading down the wrong direction after talking to several members of my mastermind group and learning from their experience.
Phase 2
Do Your Research
Ideally this phase I now know should come first. How can you pick a niche without doing your research first. You can list our areas of interest but you should definitely not commit to a niche site without having completed your research first.
This was my process
Type keywords in Google to see what websites were coming up in the top 10 results and whether or not they had low domain authority. An example of a keyword may have been ‘basketball coaching drills for kids’
You can see a websites domain authority by install the Moz Toolbar for Chrome
I was on the look out for low authority websites ranking in the top 10 search results and also results that produced forum listings as both would be easy to compete again in the hope of ranking above them.
Once I found a low authority blog I would do an Organic Search on that URL in SEMrush and see every keyword they were ranking for and how much monthly traffic approximately the website was getting. The SEMrush monthly traffic data should be taken as an indication only as it is very inaccurate at times.
I was also interested to see which keywords were driving a high percentage of a websites traffic as well with my reasoning being if they have a high percentage of traffic from one keyword all I need to do is write better content than the page that the competitors website is ranking for on that keyword and I could steal some of the traffic.
My goal in this phase was to find 20 competitiors websites and analyse all their keywords that were that were driving at least 500 views a month.
Phase 3
Compiling The Data
I ended up with 23 domain names that were related to my chosen niche. I put all 23 of those domains and then I sorted those reports by traffic and copied every keyword that was over 500 monthly searched and put them into one excel document.
I ended up having a list of 3368 keywords but I ended up scanning through them manually and deleting any keywords I thought were irrelevant and I was left with approximately half the number of keywords compared to what I started with.
I sorted the entire list by traffic to see potential patterns and I also sorted it by traffic % per domain and found some low hanging fruit I would rank for quickly with 1,500+ monthly traffic.
My next step was going to be to drop this huge list of keywords and start structuring my website. However this was before I spoke to my mastermind group members.
The first questions I asked myself
Is there enough here for me to write over 100 articles and the answer was yes.
Is there enough products to put in these articles – yes however they were of values between $20-$60 for the majority.
Am I letting my passion for this topic cloud my judgement, should I be going after a niche more statistically relevant.
After speaking to member in my mastermind group
After I had completed all the above I spoke with my mastermind group and realised a few things.
The key words I was going for were too generic, with no buyers intent. The amazon products probably weren’t the most ideal products to reach my goal of $500 a month within 6 months.
I had completely skipped the step of doing my due diligence in market research and I completely jumped straight to one niche without a great depth of research.
So here I am I am back at step 1 and I will update you next week with how I got following the steps that have been laid out for me in this challenge.
I think this is an important blog to reach in the sense that you are not guaranteed to get it right the first time.
It helps so much having people to talk to who have experience with niche sites and they can lend their knowledge and help you along the way. Don’t try and do everything on your own you can ask for help.
I more than likely would have wasted a lot of time with little results had I kept going down the path I was going. Feedback is so valuable don't be scared to share your niches amongst your internet marketing friends you have a good repore with.
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